A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.--From publisher description.Leer más

Introduction: The bricks we stand on --
Part 1: The slow poison. The wedding : fruits of freedom ; An industrial slavery : "Niggers is cheap" ; Slavery's increase : "Day after day we looked death in the face & was afraid to speak" ; Green Cottenham's world : "The negro dies faster" --
Part 2: Harvest of an unfinished war. The slave farm of John Pace : "I don't owe you anything" ; Slavery is not a crime : "We shall have to kill a thousand... to get them back to their places" ; The indictments : "I was whipped nearly every day" ; A summer of trials, 1903 : "The master treated the slave unmercifully" ; A river of anger : the south is "an armed camp" ; The disapprobation of God : "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes" ; Slavery affirmed : "Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers" ; New South rising : "The great corporation" --
Part 3: The final chapter of American slavery. The arrest of Green Cottenham : a war of atrocities ; Anatomy of a slave mine : "Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes" ; Everywhere was death : "Negro quietly swung up by an armed mob... All is quiet" ; Atlanta, the South's finest city : "I will murder you if you don't do that work" ; Freedom : "In the United States one cannot sell himself" --
Epilogue: The ephemera of catastrophe.

Resumen:

A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.--From publisher description.